"The news of Con Kolivas, a Linux kernel developer, quitting that role, along with an interview in which he explains why, could and should make loud noises around the Free Software community which is often touting GNU/Linux as the best operating system one could use, and not just because of freedom you have with it. In the interview he says certain things which should cause tectonic shifts in the mindset that we have all been having. Why didn't we realize these things before? As you can see, the article intrigued me quite a bit, and got me thinking about a better way forward for the Free Software OS. I'll go through some of the basic points that he makes and lay out one possible solution and its implications. However, take this article as just a discussion starter." My take: I have been advocating splitting the Linux kernel up (desktop, server, embedded) for years now.

I read through all the comments here and such, but I can't see anyone mentioning any single thing that would speed-up desktop and would require any modification to the kernel itself...So, someone who's up for a "desktop linux kernel", please, tell me some things that would have to be done to the kernel in order to benefit the desktop? Any? Even one? :O

Seriously, I myself don't see a single reason to fork the kernel. I'm not a kernel dev, but f.ex. laggy windows in X has nothing to do with the kernel. It's the X server, and it's being worked on. I often find for example Firefox rendering the pages a lot faster than under Linux, but I assume it's because drawing to the screen under Windows is done largely by the graphics hardware whereas in Linux it's not, atleast not as much. Beryl/Compiz etc sure render the whole window using OpenGL and as such it's fast, but the app rendering the actual contents of the window is still just as slow (or even slow, as in my case) when Beryl/Compiz is enabled. That's just because the code path for rendering graphics hasn't been optimized enough.

Anyway, enough of me babbling, I'm awaiting for someone to mention any real reasons for a fork.